It had been almost two years since Eugene had last seen Robert Weaver, but now, by one of those sudden hazards of blind chance that for a moment bring men’s lives together and in an instant show them more than years together could have done, he was to see the other youth again.
One night in his second year at Cambridge he was reading in his room at about two o’clock in the morning, at the heart and core of the brooding silence of night that had come to mean so much to him, and that had the power to stir him as no other time of day could do with a feeling of swelling and exultant joy. The house had gone to sleep long before and there was no sound anywhere: it was late in winter, along in March, and the ice and snow had been packed and frozen on the earth for months with a kind of weary permanence — with a tenacity that gave to winter a harsh and dreary reality, a protraction of grey days and grim grey light which made the memory of other seasons, and particularly the hope of spring, remote and almost unbelievable. The street outside was frozen in this living and animate silence of great cold: suddenly this still perfection of night and darkness was shattered by the engines of a powerful motor which turned into the end of the street from Massachusetts Avenue, and tore along before the house at drunken speed with a roaring explosion of sound. Then, without slackening its speed, the brakes were jammed on, the car skidded murderously to a halt on the slippery pavement, and immediately backed up at full speed until it came before the house again, skidded to a halt and was abruptly silent.
Someone got out with the same violent impatience, slammed the door, and then for a moment he could hear him hunting along the street, swearing and muttering to himself; at length he came back to the house started up the steps on which he slipped or stumbled and fell heavily, after which he heard Robert cursing in a tone of hoarse and feverish discontent: “The God-damnedest place I ever saw. . . . Did they never hear of a light around here? . . . Who the hell would want to live in a place like this?”
He began to hammer at the front door and to bawl out Eugene’s name at the top of his voice: then he came up outside his windows and began to knock on the glass impatiently with his fist. Eugene went to the door and let him in: he entered the room without a word, and with the intent driving movement of a man who is very drunk; then he looked at him scornfully and accusingly, and barked out: “What time do you go to bed? . . . Do you stay up all night? . . . What do you do, sleep all morning?” . . . He looked around the room: the floor was strewn with books he had been reading and littered with pieces of paper on which he had been writing. Robert broke into his sudden, hoarse, falsetto laugh: “The damnedest place I ever saw!” he said. “Do you sleep on that thing?” he said contemptuously, pointing to his cot bed which stood along the wall in one corner of the room.
“No, Robert,” he said, “I sleep on the floor. I use that for an ice-box.”
“What’s that in the corner?” Robert asked, pointing to some dirty shirts he had thrown there. “Shirts? . . . How long has it been since you sent anything to the laundry? . . . What do you do when you want a shirt, go out and buy one? . . . Do you ever take a bath? . . . Have you had a bath since you came to Harvard?” He laughed suddenly, hoarsely and wildly again, hurled himself into a chair, sighed sharply with a weary and impatient discontent, began to pass his hand across his forehead with an abstracted and weary movement, and said, “Lord! Lord! Lord! . . . The things I’ve done!” he shook his head mournfully. “Why, it’s awful,” he said, and he started to shake his head again.
“Why don’t you try to talk a little louder?” Eugene suggested. “I think there are a few people over in South Boston who haven’t heard you yet.”
He laughed, hoarsely and abruptly, and then resumed his abstracted and repentant shaking of the head, sighing heavily from time to time and saying, “Lord!”
It was the first time Eugene had seen Robert in two years. Under the hard light that he kept burning in his room he now looked closely at him: he wore a Derby hat that became his small lean head well, and he had on a magnificent fur coat, such as the rich Harvard boys wear, that came down almost to his shoe-tops. For the rest, he was quietly and elegantly tailored with the distinction he had always seemed to get into his clothes — there was always, even in his boyhood, a kind of formal dignity in his dress: he always wore a stiff, starched collar.
Robert’s face had grown thinner, he looked haggard and a good deal older: the lines of his sharp, incisive features were more deeply cut and his eyes, now injected and bloodshot from heavy drinking, were more wild and feverish in their restless discontent than they had ever been — he seemed to be lashed and driven by a savage and desperate hunger which he could neither satisfy nor articulate: he was being consumed and torn to pieces by a torment of desire and longing, the cause of which he could not define, and which he had no means to assuage or quench.
He had a bottle half filled with whisky in the pocket of his fur coat: he took it out and offered Eugene a drink, and after he had drunk he put the bottle to his lips and gulped down all that remained in a single draught. Then he flung the empty bottle away impatiently on the table; it was obvious that the liquor, instead of giving him some peace or comfort, acted as savagely and immediately as oil poured on the tumult of a raging fire — it fed and spurred the madness in him and gave him no release until he had drunk himself into a state of paralysis and stupefaction. He was one of those men for whom alcohol was a fatal and uncontrollable stimulant: having once drawn the cork from a bottle and tasted his first drink he was then powerless to resist or stop: he drank until he could drink no more, and he would beg, fight, lie, cheat, crawl or walk or incur any desperate risk or danger to get more drink. Yet, he told Eugene that until his twenty-first year he had never tasted liquor: he began to drink during his last year in college, and during the two years that followed he had gone far on the road toward alcoholism.
Eugene asked him how he had found out where he lived and, still passing his hand across his forehead, he answered in an impatient and abstracted tone: “Oh . . . I don’t know. . . . Someone told me, I guess. . . . I think it was Arthur Kittrell,” and then he fell to shaking his head again, and saying, “Awful! awful! awful! . . . Do you know how much money I’ve spent so far this year? . . . Forty-eight hundred dollars. . . . So help me, God. I hope I may die if I’m not telling you the truth! Why, it’s awful!” he said, and burst into a laugh.
“Have you travelled around a lot?” Gene asked.
“Have I? My God! I’ve spent only one week-end in New Haven since the beginning of the year,” he said. “Why, it’s terrible! . . . Do you know whom I’m rooming with?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Andy Westerman,” he said impressively and then, as the name communicated none of its significance to Gene, he added impatiently: “Why, you’ve heard of the Westermans, haven’t you? . . . My God! what have you been doing all your life? . . . You’ve heard of the Westerman vacuum cleaners and electric refrigerators, haven’t you? . . . Why, he’s worth $20,000,000 if he’s worth a cent! . . . The craziest man that ever lived!” he said, breaking suddenly into a sharp recollective laugh.
“Who? Westerman?”
“No. . . . My room-mate . . . that damned Andy Westerman. . . . Do you want to meet him?”
“Is he up here with you?”
“Why, that’s what I’m telling you,” he said impatiently.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” said Robert with a laugh. “In jail by now, I reckon. . . . I left him down at the Copley Plaza an hour ago stopping everyone who came in and asking him if he’d ever been to Harvard. . . . If the man said yes, Andy would haul off and hit him as hard as he could. . . . God! the craziest man!” he said. Then, in a feverish staccato monologue, he continued: “The damnedest story you ever heard. . . . You never heard anything like the way I met him in your life. . . . Passed right out in the gutter on Park Avenue one night. . . . All alone. . . . They’d given me knock-out drops in some joint and robbed me. . . . Waked up in the most magnificent apartment you ever saw in your life. . . . Most beautiful woman you ever saw sitting right there on the bed holding my hand. . . . Andy Westerman’s sister. . . . God! they’ve got stuff in that place that cost a fortune. . . . They’ve got one picture that the old man paid a hundred thousand dollars for. . . . Damned little thing that doesn’t take up a foot of space. . . . Twenty million dollars! Yes, sir! . . . And those two get it all. . . . Why, it’ll ruin me!” he burst out. “It takes every cent I can get to keep up with ’em. . . . My God! I never saw a place like this in my life! . . . These people up here think no more of spending a thousand dollars than we’d think of fifty cents down home. . . . God! I’ve got to do something. . . . I’ve got to get money somehow. . . . Yes, sir, Robert is going to be right up there among them. . . . Apartment on Park Avenue and everything. . . . God! that’s the most beautiful woman in the world! All I want is to sleep with her just once. . . . Yes, sir, just once . . . .
“And to think that she’d go and throw herself away on that damned consumptive little . . .!” he fairly ground his teeth together, turned away abruptly, and did not finish.
“Throw herself away on whom? Who is this, Robert?”
“Ah-h! that damned little fellow Upshaw that she’s married to: been waiting — praying — hoping that he’d die for months — she’ll marry me just as soon as he’s out of the way — and he knows it! The damned little rat!” He gnashed his teeth savagely. “He’s hanging on just as long as he can to spite us!” And he cursed bitterly, with a terrible unconscious humour, against a man who was too stubborn to oblige him by an early death.
Then he jumped up and said abruptly: “Do you want to go to New York with me?”
“When?”
“Right now!” said Robert. “I’m ready to go this very minute. Come on!”— and he started impatiently toward the door.
When Eugene made no move to follow him, he turned and came back, saying in a resentful tone: “Well, are you coming, or are you just trying to bluff about it?”
For a moment, the boy was infected by the other’s madness, too near akin to his own ever to be wholly strange to him. The prospect of that reckless, drunken, purposeless flight through darkness towards the magic city held him with hypnotic power. Then, rudely, painfully, he broke the spell and answered curtly:
“I wouldn’t go as far as Harvard Square with you tonight, Robert. Not if you’re going to drive that car. You’re too drunk to know what you’re doing and you’ll have a smash-up as sure as you live if you try to drive.”
He was, in fact, wildly and dangerously drunk by now and Eugene began to think of some way of persuading him to go to sleep and of finding some place where he could spend the night: in his own room there was only a single cot, and it was too late to rouse the Murphys — they had been in bed for hours. Then he remembered that Mr. Wang had an extra couch in one of his rooms: it was a very comfortable one and he did not think that Wang would make any objection to Robert’s sleeping there if he explained the situation to him. Therefore, he cautioned Robert to keep quiet, and went to Wang’s door and knocked. Presently he appeared sleepily, thrusting out his fat, drowsy, and troubled face to see what the trouble was: when Eugene told him he agreed very generously and readily to let Robert sleep upon the couch and thus the young man got him settled at length, although not before the sudden apparition of a dragon with a scaly tail — one of the drawings that hung above the couch — had wrested from him a howl of terror: he had sprung out of bed and rushed out of Wang’s apartment and into Eugene’s, saying hoarsely, and in a tone of frightened indignation: “Do you expect me to spend the night alone in there with that damned Chinaman and his dragon? . . . How do I know what he’ll do? . . . One of those people would cut your throat while you’re asleep and think nothing of it. . . . I’m not going to stay in there.” Gene finally persuaded him of Wang’s innocence and kindness, and at length he went off to sleep after drinking the better part of a bottle of Wang’s rice wine.